Le château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye

My mother is visiting us for a few weeks. We don’t have the best weather at the moment, but according to the french people this is typical April weather. In one day (and each day) you will have rain and sunshine. Some days we were lucky to be inside when it rains, but the first day in Paris the rain caught us a bit and it was really cold. Later this week we will try again. For now we drove around close to where we live.

Wednesday we went to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, half an hour from us. The beautiful castle now hosts an archaeology museum. Everything from the stone age, iron age, bronze age and so on… The building itself is worth a visit and then there is the garden. We didn’t see all of it, it is just too big. A place to remember for a nice walk.

Le château

the chapel inside the castle

tulips…

…and the rest of the gardens

Traffic circles or gardens?

2 September 2011

In Cergy there are more circles than traffic lights. The circles are big so traffic flows nicely. But the reason to mention circles has got nothing to do with traffic… each circle is a park or garden on its own, and most even have their own name.

It is easy to have so many flowers here… it rains so much! When we moved in they had to clean our garden, it was completely ‘overgrown’.  We have roses and they were pruned in the middle of summer. I’m sure that’s the wrong time to prune a rose, but now, a month later, they are green and the first roses are opening already.
and some of the circles…

rond-point des coudraies
 

in Vaureal…

one with an apple orchard…
 

flowers…!

rond-point du miroir…

…on RSG (wonderful internet!) I hear everyone talking about the flowers in Namaqualand… which is just as lovely. This morning on facebook my old afrikaans teacher added this…
No, he’s not old, its just a long time ago I was in the afrikaans class. : )

Op die groot saaidag van die heelal
het reeds ʼn entjie duskant Wupperthal
oor die kaal Noordweste
ʼn sakkie van die Heer se beste
saad per ongeluk gelek, gelek en uitgeval.
(DJ Opperman)

MOOI!

Un abri de jardin

7 August 2011

That is french for a garden shed. Ok, I only made the title french to make you read on… now it sounds like some french adventure. As this is my diary I had to add the garden shed, because this whole weekend was taken up by this abri de jardin!
Our house is a bit smaller than what we had in Cape Town. At the moment there are a few things packed in the garage, with everything that belongs in a garage. Our plan was to get a garden shed and pack the garage things there and then we can use the garage as an extra room or at least a neat storage room.
Thursday evening we bought the shed at Leroy Merlin. Many shops here also rent out vans or trucks for you to do your own delivery. You rent it for an hour, pay about 10€ and take your things home that can’t fit in your car. So, we also booked one of their small trucks for Friday afternoon as we thought this was something that you need more time for and more space…
Friday afternoon, off we went to Leroy Merlin. We signed all the forms for the truck, after it was checked and explained to us how it all works. Got the keys and drove in to the ‘yard’ to pick up our shed. The young guy who helped us came with a forklift and parked next to us. We looked on the huge shelves but couldn’t see where he was going to find the shed. Then we saw it was already on the forklift… a box of 1,8m by 1m and about 15 cm thick! We were convinced that it couldn’t be! A whole garden shed in that box. The end of the story… we gave the truck back and ‘easily’ fit the box in the back of our Opel Zafira. The young guy said that he told Danie the previous evening that he didn’t need a truck… but that was probably misunderstood with the mix of bits of english and bits of french!

the box…

and here we go…

a short break…

and the rest…

… two days, six people, lots of parts from a small box and many screws to make one garden shed.